Word: primae
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...Crossroads. In its first Manhattan week, the Royal Ballet proved again that in such romantic ballets as Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake it is matchless in the West. At 41, jewel-like Prima Ballerina Margot Fonteyn is one year beyond the age at which it was once rumored she would retire. But she exhilarated audiences with her fluid, exquisite enchaine-ment and her seemingly gravity-free grace, though purists insisted they detected a slight falling-off from the sureness of her performance in New York three years ago. Later in the week the troupe unpacked La Fille Mai Gard...
...scene change in ten seconds. In the 40-odd rooms where actors and singers once lived while the royal family was in residence at Drottningholm, the original hand-painted wallpaper survives-as does a wicked caricature of a needle-nosed French ballet master penciled on the wall of the prima. donna's dressing room. A gold-painted harpsichord, discovered under the stage and now used by the orchestra, is considered one of the 18th century's best...
...summer villa near Parma, the Metropolitan Opera's latest girl wonder, pretty, Pennsylvania-born Soprano Anna Moffo, was asked by a spokesman for several Italian opera companies to restrain the Italian press from swooning in print over "L'Esotica's" glamorous charms-the home-grown prima donnas are hitting high "C with jealousy. But Anna only shrugged: "Who ever heard of telling the press what to say? I'm not in the business of smoothing the ruffled feathers of other divas! Opera is a dog-eat-dog business...
...managing artists, I never quite got used to the sharp little men who tell me where Madame is to be booked, what fee she is to be paid, who is to sing with her and what the critics will have to write. Somewhere in the brain of every prima donna there is a deep craving for security and comfort, linked with fear of old age. This causes her to pick a man who is prepared to act as a permanent wet nurse...
...Prima-donna manners were rampant on both sides. Equity Chief Counsel Herman Cooper (President Ralph Bellamy was busy in Hollywood, playing F.D.R. in the movie version of Sunrise at Campobello) announced that the union would not go on strike, would simply call evening "meetings" of various casts, shutting down a different show every night. When the union started this "legal harassment" with The Tenth Man, the producers regarded it as a strike, closed all Broadway shows...